Cameron: Aegis VII Megavent Supervisor

Cameron was a Concordance Extraction Corporation employee who served as supervisor of the Megavents at the Aegis VII colony, the vast subterranean vent network built to accommodate the settlement's planet-side gravity tethers. In the colony's final weeks he became the first person on record to find the Corruption, the necrotic organic growth that spread ahead of the Necromorph outbreak, and he spent his last days trying to burn it out of the vents he managed. When the planet crack carried out by the USG Ishimura plunged the colony into a blackout, the organism he had been fighting killed him inside his own Megavents.

Supervisor of the Megavents#

The Megavents were a standard structural feature of colonies financed by the Concordance Extraction Corporation: massive circular subterranean networks of catwalks and paths that stretched for miles beneath a settlement, built primarily to accommodate the planet-side gravity tethers that made a planet crack operation possible. The colony on Aegis VII maintained at least twenty seven of them, including Megavent 24, which housed Gravity Tether 16 and the colony's life support power room.

Cameron, a white haired, blue eyed man who worked in a standard maintenance RIG, held the post of Megavent Supervisor for the colony. The workers assigned to Megavent 24 under his supervision included Lambert and an engineer named Q. Denvers. It was an unglamorous position deep in the colony's infrastructure, far from the dig sites and the administrative offices, but the events of 2508 placed Cameron's vents at the center of the catastrophe that consumed Aegis VII. His station in the deep network made him the first witness to the organism that would overrun the colony.

The first report of the growth#

Cameron's discovery began with a smell. A horrible odor drifting through the vent network led him to a strange organic substance growing where nothing should have been growing at all, and he reported the find to P-Sec, the colony's Planetary Security force. The officer Abraham Neumann was sent down to assist him, and together the two men made a discovery worse than the smell: when they inspected the small growth closely, it seemed to move.

Neumann's response was practical. He ordered Cameron to use a blow-torch to burn away any such growth he encountered from that point on, and to alert him whenever more of it appeared. Neither man yet understood what they were looking at. The substance was the Corruption, the living tissue that accompanied the Necromorph infestation, and its appearance in the Megavents made Cameron's report the earliest recorded sighting of the organism anywhere on Aegis VII. Observers who came after him noted the same distinctive stench that had first drawn Cameron to the growth.

A losing fight in the vents#

The blow-torch was not enough. Within days Cameron contacted Neumann again to report that he had not only found the growth a second time but "a hell of a lot more of it." The organism was outpacing him, and he enlisted Lambert to help burn it out of the vents.

The fight went badly from the start. Lambert arrived late and visibly exhausted, telling his supervisor that he was having trouble sleeping, a complaint that had spread through the colony's workforce in the period after the discovery of Marker 3A. When Lambert saw the mass of tissue, he was startled by how much it had grown in a single night. Cameron told him he could make up for his late arrival by getting inside the vents and burning the growth down himself. Around the same period, Denvers wrote a report on the growing mass of tissue spreading through the Megavents, noting that it was rapidly growing out of control and expressing his hope that the colony's scientists were looking into it. Whatever attention the reports received, no help reached the vent crews. Cameron and his workers were left to hold back the Corruption with hand tools while the colony above them slid into dementia, violence, and religious hysteria under the influence of the Marker.

Death in the blackout#

When the USG Ishimura executed the planet crack, tearing a continent-sized chunk from the surface of Aegis VII, the colony below suffered a widespread blackout. In the darkened Megavents, Lambert went missing. Cameron went into the vents after him and found only Lambert's flashlight lying abandoned. As he called out for his missing worker, a mass of Corruption burst through a vent beside him, struck his head, and killed him. Lambert died in the same doomed effort to destroy the growth. Both men were lost in 2508, in the opening hours of the outbreak that went on to annihilate the colony and the Ishimura above it.

Cameron did not live to learn what the substance in his vents actually was, or that the infestation he had tried to burn away with a blow-torch was beyond the power of any maintenance crew to stop. His reports nevertheless left a mark on the record of the disaster. The Megavents he supervised were documented as the first location on Aegis VII to harbor the Corruption, and the odor he identified became the recognized signature of the growth for those who encountered it after him. The man responsible for the colony's deepest infrastructure was the first to find the infestation growing inside it, and among the first it killed.